“Food sovereignty” – people’s right to decide what they eat and what they produce – is today one of the hottest topics debated around food policies.
It arose in the mid-1990s, when the debates around food policies were dominated by the globalisation of agribusiness and by food aid. At that time, peasants and small farmers who were – and still are – the world’s main food producers saw that the policies implemented were serving large conglomerates and not the people – transforming small-scale agriculture into industrial plantations; dumping food surpluses from rich countries in poor ones; increasing the use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers; concentrating food production in the hands of multinationals.
